


Melanie King: Ghost Punch UK

by MilkyMint



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: F/F, Good times, Light trespassing, but probably set around mid season 3, canon typical description of a messed up ghost, spoiler free
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-01
Updated: 2020-02-01
Packaged: 2021-02-25 17:34:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22499881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MilkyMint/pseuds/MilkyMint
Summary: It’s not that Melanie minds being a guest on What The Ghost, but when Georgie invited her out for drinks she didn’t expect there to be a microphone between them.
Relationships: Georgie Barker/Melanie King
Comments: 6
Kudos: 45





	Melanie King: Ghost Punch UK

Melanie watches as Georgie counts down from five fingers before pressing a key on the laptop she’s arranged on the small table between them.  
There’s barely enough space for it, the microphone, Georgie’s notes, and their drinks, and Melanie keeps a suspicious eye on her Gin and Tonic as it wobbles near the edge whenever one of them moves too much.  
Georgie doesn’t seem concerned with the safety of her equipment, she is keeping an eye on the waveforms instead as she starts to speak.  
“Hello Ghosts and Ghouls, welcome to another episode of ‘What The Ghost?’. I’m your host Georgie Barker, and this episode is recorded live at the ‘King of Crabs’, allegedly London’s most haunted pub.”

  
She gives Melanie a silent finger gun, who opens with the one thing she’s managed to google since she realised this was going to be a work thing.  
“A claim it shares with no fewer than thirty-seven pubs, each about equally haunted.”  
Georgie gives her a chagrined look over the laptop, but doesn’t break her stride.  
“As you can hear, I’ve got a very special guest here with me today. Melanie King, famed and infamed founder of ‘Ghost Hunt UK’, and all around expert for hands-on ghost reporting. Melanie, how would you rate your experience here so far?”

Melanie takes one long look around the pub, the tourists, teenagers, and office workers, and rolls her eyes at Georgie.  
“Just a quick reminder that this is an audio medium, so our listeners can not see how your face is frozen in terror at the apparitions in every corner.”  
Melanie grimaces, she really misses producing videos.  
“Right, sorry. This place is. Okay. It’s a pub. Your pretty standard edition, lots of wood paneling and charmingly mismatched furniture, but not quite a tourist trap. The drinks are cold, and the service is quick. Wouldn’t say it feels particularly haunted.The scariest thing is that gaggle of business people in the corner booth, and I'm pretty sure we could take them. ”  
It comes out more sour than she intended, she really doesn't like being put on the spot like this, but Georgie chuckles and picks up her notes.

It’s not a bad pub, but when Georgie told her that they should get drinks at this amazing place, Melanie had kind of expected a date.  
She spent a good hour figuring out her outfit. She put on her fancy make up! And when she got here, Georgie was already set up with her laptop and microphone, wearing a jeans and t-shirt combo with a short leather jacket.  
Of course she still looks great, because Georgie always looks great. That jacket really brings out her shoulders. It’s not helping Melanie find her rhythm.  
Melanie settles back and sips her drink, content to watch as Georgie reads off her research notes.

"Now this pub got its sordid reputation relatively recent, specifically in the late 40s.  
After the bombardment of World War 2, a lot of the city was reduced to rubble, and only the most important archeological findings could be considered in the massive rebuilding project.  
So when they were setting the foundation for this building and found an adult human skeleton, archeologists were content to just log it and move on.  
Finding a skeleton where it shouldn't be isn't that unusual. The city has been here for a while, people are going to get buried in places they shouldn’t. It would have been nothing more than an interesting addition to the murder maps of London, but when they kept digging, they kept finding bodies. All buried in the same position, lying on their right side with their legs and arms tucked in, with their head facing east. I’ll put some of the pictures from the dig up on our instagram, so look out for that!  
The dating of the bones, as well as a few coins, revealed that each body was buried about a hundred years apart, dating back aaaaaaaall the way to 60-ish A.D, the days of roman colonisation, Londinium, and Boudicca."

  
She looks back at Melanie, and gives a quick nod towards the microphone.  
Melanie glares at Georgie, swallows the drink she just sipped, and starts talking quickly.  
"Ah, the good old days. So you're thinking, what? Immortal roman serial killer, forever seeking revenge against those pesky celts?"  
"That is one possibility, sure. But I’m suspecting something along the lines of an intense spiritual imprint causing susceptible humans to act out repeating patterns. What we in the community like to call ‘extremely bad vibes’.“  
Melanie winces, but plays along. It's her night off, and she is going to have a good time.  
“That is the official term, yes. Although I’ve also heard ‘ominous portents’, ‘a strange feeling in the aether’, and ‘the creeps’.”  
That gets her a smile that heats the room up several degrees, but Melanie manages to continue on sounding professional: “So what kind of sightings have there been?”  
“We are going to cover that once we actually get to the place of the haunting.”  
“This isn’t it? I thought this was one of London’s most haunted pubs?”  
“Well, they used to have a lot of plastic spiders and crystals and stuff like that lying around. Not sure where they’ve gone. The actual haunting seems to have been confined to the basement.”  
She waves at someone behind Melanie, and focuses back on the mic.

“But we’re about to talk to one of the staff here, and he’s promised us an exclusive tour of the basement, where a bit of roman brickwork is still preserved. If there is anything sinister going on, it might just be baked into the very foundation of this house.”  
Melanie grimaces at the horrible pun, and Georgie makes a very insincere apologetic gesture.  
The waiter who shuffles over doesn’t seem to thrilled to be there.  
“Hey Georgie” he mumbles, avoiding eye contact.  
“Hi Henry. Please, speak into the microphone.”  
Henry sighs and doesn’t get any closer to the mic.  
“Yeah, listen. I’m really sorry about this, but I talked to my boss, and she doesn’t really want that kind of attention anymore? Apparently we’re trying to gentrify,” he adds with an apologetic glance at the corner booth, were the business people have evolved from after work drinks to ‘thank god it’s friday’ drinks.

“I was wondering where all your halloween decorations went. I really loved the pumpkin witch.”  
Georgie presses a key on the laptop, pauses the recording.  
“Listen, you wrote to me to come all the way out here, I really don’t want that to have been for nothing. If it helps, we could anonymise the location, or stick to just the archeological facts.”  
Henry looks truly miserable, but shakes his head. "Sorry, I'd like to help, but not enough to lose my job. Drinks are on me though.”  
He shuffles back to the bar, and Georgie sighs in frustration, clicks a few more things on the laptop, before shutting it with a bit more force than is necessary.  
“Well, it’s always nice to look like an absolute nerd in public for nothing. Good thing I have my backlog built up.”

  
Melanie however is not ready to call it quits yet. She’d just started getting comfortable. They were building a rapport!  
“We can still do the episode, right? They haven’t thrown us out yet, so recording seems fine. Plus hey, free drinks! There’s worse ways to spend an evening. So have there been any ghost sightings?”  
But Georgie continues packing her equipment up.  
“If we’re not doing anything on location, I might as well just record it in my studio. That way I can use the pictures of the digsite for reference without anyone calling the police. And I won't have to edit around that,” she adds as the first lines of ‘Happy Birthday’ drift from somewhere in the pub.  
Melanie nods in sympathy. "Copyright is a bitch."  
Georgie snorts, and zips up her bag.  
“I really wanted to see that roman brickwork though,” she says wistfully.  
“That is it,” Melanie says, and drains the rest of her drink. “I’m getting you in that basement!”

—

The declaration turns out to be a lot more dramatic than the actual act warrants.  
All it takes is ignoring the 'Staff Only' sticker on the door right next to the bathroom and a few careful steps down a narrow concrete stairway.  
The cleaning standards are definitely lower back here, but the lightbulbs are working, illuminating a short hallway with an empty door frame on one side, and a closed metal door at the end. It’s a basement. Stale air, more dust than Melanie would prefer for her date night outfit, but utterly mundane.  
The empty door frame leads to a storage room, with a couple of broken chairs and a stack of cardboard boxes, the one on top labeled ‘spooky stuff’, the others too faded to make out. Probably more stuff the pub doesn’t need on a day-to-day basis.

Georgie stops for a moment and hides her equipment bag under one of the chairs, and interprets Melanie’s quizzical look wrong.  
“What? It’s heavy, ” she says defensively.  
“No, that’s not it. Just. You’re not recording?”  
“Of course not. I’m not going to record us trespassing.”  
“Huh. Smart.”  
“That is a pretty low bar to clear. "  
Melanie decides to head for the other room instead of answering.

That room turns out to be the boiler room. Blank concrete walls, a single naked light bulb hanging from a low ceiling, a few candy wrappers, a bunch of pipes running along the walls and disappearing into the ceiling, and, somewhat disturbingly, a fuse box right next to the door, with visible cables running around around the pipes.

The roman brickwork turns out to not actually be brickwork at all, but a big solid block of roman concrete at the far wall, right next to the boiler. Sure, there’s bits and pieces stuck in it that resemble bricks, but Melanie doesn’t think that excuses sloppy classification.  
Just an ordinary piece of good old opus caementicium, too cumbersome to strip for parts or move out of the way, not interesting enough to be preserved.

  
Melanie still steps closer to give it a cursory examination, but can’t feel truly excited about it, not when the horror of shoddy engineering seems much more dangerous at the moment. "Why would they put the fusebox all the way down here?” she asks absentmindedly.  
“That's the least efficient set up I've ever seen. And what’s up with those pipes? The placement looks almost random.”  
Georgie is squinting into the nest of pipes and cables.  
"Probably home rigged,” she replies.  
“And while it's definitely not up to code, I don't think this time the ghost was bad plumbing all along.” Georgie gives one of the pipes a cautionary pat.  
“There wasn't any report of strange noises, just the usual ‘pub with a murder basement’ stuff. Honestly, I thought I was going to really have to play up the scary atmosphere angle."

Melanie crouches down carefully and runs her hand over where the roman concrete meets the modern-ish addition, and wonders if their canceled tour has less to do with gentrification and more with avoiding the wrath of archeological purists. The grooves in the ancient stuff make her think it might have been part of a longer wall, broken by an excavator, back when you could just start digging and not- there’s a foot on the ground next to the grooves,and Melanie is scrambling sideways before fully registering that the foot is attached to a leg, and all of that is part of a ghost.

The ghost looks solid, it could just be a man in a tunic and sandal-boots, not exactly the fashion of the year, but not the strangest thing you could find in London any given day.  
What gives it away is that he is standing halfway in the concrete, the right side of his body hidden in the ancient wall.

Melanie gets back to her feet and stands next to Georgie, who is already fumbling with the zipper on her jacket pocket, trying to get her phone out.  
The ghost isn't paying them any attention, either he hasn't noticed them or just finds the boiler right in front of his head more interesting.  
“Oh wow, ” Melanie whispers. ”Hah! That actually is a roman. I think. Looks clean shaven at least, and I don’t think a celt would have gone for that look at the time.”  
Her excitement quickly makes room for frustration.  
“Damn it, I wish I had brought any of my equipment, but this stupid tiny purse doesn’t even hold the EMF-Meter. Honestly, who designs these things-”  
“Melanie.” Georgie interrupts her. The ghost has turned towards them, and now that he’s free of the wall, the caved in right side of his skull is visible. Melanie isn’t an expert, but it looks like repeated blunt trauma.  
Not the result of the sword in his right hand that he’s raising then, that thing looks more suited for stabbing than bashing.  
The sword is narrow, with a triangular tip, at least at long as Melanie’s arm, so long it phases through the ceiling as the ghost raises it over his head, but Melanie has no doubt that if it hits flesh, it will hurt.

Melanie doesn’t hesitate.  
While the ghost wastes time screeching at them, she pushes Georgie behind her, clears the distance between them with two quick steps, and decks that fucker right in the face.  
The ghost stops screaming and then it stops existing. Thin red lines spread from where her fist connected, following the trail of long dried veins and arteries. His good eye stays fixed on Melanie, she can’t tell if it’s wide with hatred or fear, until that too becomes covered in the dark tendrils.  
They give one quick pulse, and the ghost bursts, and the lightbulb goes out.  
Georgie curses softly, and raises her phone, the white light blinding Melanie.  
She is breathing heavily, and her fists are still clenched, as she waits for the ghost to reappear and make his move.

Seconds tick by with nothing happening.

“Fuse box.” Georgie says calmly, before she reaches over, takes Melanie’s hand and pulls her out of the room.  
They are halfway through the hallway when the door at the top opens, and noise from the pub, more frantic than before, floods in. Georgie dashes into the storage room, stuffs her phone back in her pocket to hide the light, and makes a tiny ‘shh’ noise.  
They stand in silence as someone, the slow steps and continued muttering indicate Henry, makes their way down the stairs.  
Melanie barely hears it over the sound of her heartbeat thundering in her ears, probably left over adrenalin, and it doesn’t help that Georgie is still holding her hand, and that they are standing close enough that Melanie can smell Georgie’s flowery shampoo, even over the general staleness of the room...

And then the door to the boiler room closes with a loud bang that startles her back into focus.  
Georgie goes first, regrettably letting go of Melanie’s hand to grab her equipment bag. Melanie fumbles with her stupid tiny purse in the dark for a moment, before following her up the stairs.  
They make it right to the door before the lights turn back on, and wait until a cheer from the pub assures them that Henry has made it back up safe and sound.  
Then they quickly walk away until they find an empty bench to collapse on.

Melanie breaks the silence first.  
"So, ancient roman ghost serial killer, not that far off."  
"Alright, you win this round,” Georgie admits graciously.  
After a moment of silence, she looks over at Melanie and asks:“Should we, I don’t know, do something about it?"  
"I'm not sure. Who do we even call. And if you say what I know you want to say, Georgina Barker, I will punch the ghost right out of you.”  
Georgie fakes wounded innocence, before her face turns serious again and she says:  
" I mean, if the reports from the digsite are correct, the youngest skeleton came from 1818, if the… the ancient roman ghost serial killer was still active, there should have been something more recent by now."  
"Seemed pretty active to me."  
“It went down with a single punch.”  
“Maybe I’m just very impressive.”  
“That you are.”  
They just stare at each other, before Georgie continues:  
"Well, I'll put the word out on the forums, there's some people there who are just itching to do a good exorcism. And I guess you could tell people at the institute? "  
"I don't think that would help. Our motto seems to be: ‘The Magnus Institute. We don't do much!’"  
They sit in silence for a moment, before Melanie remember something important.  
“I got you something!”  
Georgie turns and looks at her skeptically.  
"I already got free drinks, DIY basement engineering, and a murder ghost. I’m not sure I can handle much more excitement tonight, Melanie.”  
“Oh, but this one is good!”  
Getting the round ceramic out of the stupid tiny purse takes some effort, but they way Georgie’s eyes light up when she sees it makes it worth it.  
"Pumpkin Witch," she whispers with more reverence than the garish figurine of a jack-o-lantern wearing a witches hat warrants.  
Melanie gives an exaggerated sigh of relief.  
"Oh thank god, I thought it might be a witch pumpkin. I'd hate to add theft to my criminal record for no good reason."  
She holds it out to Georgie with both hands, and Georgie reaches out both of hers.  
But she doesn’t take the figurine. She doesn’t even look at it. She gently cups her hands around Melanie’s, looks at her with a soft smile and says: "You really are impressive. I've never even heard anyone claim they punched a ghost. It was so cool." Then she just looks at Melanie with that beautiful smile.

Melanie clears her throat and says with as much casualness as she can fake:  
“Right, I’m just going to say, as a suggestion, if you are interested in kissing me, now would be a pretty good moment.”

Georgie doesn’t hesitate.


End file.
